Origin

The Confraternity is a relatively new Military Brotherhood, but it is also one of the fastest growing. Relatively poor as far as such organizations go, the brothers of the Confraternity are eager to make their mark. Given the Confraternity’s somewhat dubious origin, this has made a number of planets extremely wary of them, but they have acquitted themselves well, putting their past successfully behind them.

Unlike the Caractacan Brotherhood, the Confraternity has no one founder. The First Brothers were in fact a mercenary company working the Sobretan Circuit. The Circuit is perhaps misnamed; there is no formal agreement as to what systems comprise it, and many trouble spots that are considered parts of it are actually outside the Sobretan Sector. Many of the worlds on the Circuit are perpetual flashpoints, many of them jointly colonized by outsystem factions that then had a falling out. They are not necessarily always made up of different races, either. Some of the nastiest wars have been human on human, or forvak on forvak.

Some of the older members of Rheloman’s Company, a mix of humans, forvaks, gordoks, and sefkhit, were talking one day, and hatched on the plan to start their own Military Brotherhood. No one can be sure of their exact motivation. The Confraternity’s founding documents are full of high ideals and a story about the First Brothers’ weariness at the constant wars and corruption they had seen. Some of it is doubtless true. There are other tales told, however, that the Confraternity was an attempt by the First Brothers to win some greater legitimacy among higher-paying clientele. It could even have been conceived as a front to allow for quick smash-and-grab robberies of rich clients who let the Confraternity in out of trust. A Military Brotherhood is far more respectable than a Private Military Company, in many eyes. Continue reading

Origins

“Keder M’ell” was the name chosen by the mixed group of gordoks, feshen, and humans who fled the Kesterev System to the star designated 4477 Ravati. Proponents of a splinter cult from the Church of the Universe Manifest, they had reportedly begun experimenting with certain mind-altering drugs in an attempt to communicate directly with “The Universe.” Several of these drugs were banned by all three of the Kesterev governments, due to extremely dangerous—often lethal—side effects. This led to clashes between the cultists and all three governments, leading to an eventual split in the cult between insurgents and those who desired simply to leave to conduct their experiments elsewhere. The insurgents stayed. The more “peaceable” fraction boarded starships and fled to the red dwarf designated 4477 Ravati.

They could not have picked a more unlikely system to attempt to colonize. Red dwarf stars are notoriously unstable. Of two planetary bodies orbiting 4477 Ravati, one was a red giant of sufficient mass to almost be classified as a brown dwarf. The other, a terrestrial planet of 0.6 Earth masses which the cultists named Keder M’ell, was tidally locked to the red dwarf. Its atmosphere was mostly sulfur dioxide, lethally poisonous to all three races. But it was precisely that inhospitability that the cultists apparently found appealing.

For the first generation, Keder M’ell remained utterly unknown to anyone but the colonists, who huddled in their buried habs and attempted to find new ways to commune with the Universe. At least half of them died in the first ten thousand hours, both from drug poisoning and from accidents. None of them had truly been prepared for the rigors and dangers of their new home, and they paid the price for it. Continue reading

A Flawed Edifice

The Triamic Hegemony might have seemed strangely monolithic to outsiders, particularly in a galaxy where a government that even encompassed an entire planet was rare. But beneath the surface, the unprecedented edifice of the Hegemony had deeper cracks than any aliens realized.

The Hegemony was ultimately built upon a stratified alliance of triamic packs. It was the result of centuries of wars for territory and dominance, out of which the order of precedence of the packs within the Hegemony slowly and painfully emerged. To some of the more idealistic aliens, the Hegemony seemed to be a dream come true, a truly interstellar civilization of a high order of technology and sociological sophistication. But it was built upon a foundation of hundreds of triamic years of ferocious bloodshed. And, as it turned out, that foundation was far shakier than believed, even by most of the triamic. Continue reading

A Strange And Tragic People

The Triamic are not the first sapient race in the galaxy to go extinct. They are, however, one of the most recent, at least as far as is known to students of alien anthropology. Even more tragically, they were well on their way to becoming the first true galactic superpower, just before the collapse.

History

Having independently developed their own version of the Bergenholm field before they attempted their own diaspora, the Triamic exploded out of their home system almost overnight. As a pack-based society, they had already established the Hegemony in their home system, with a complex system of dominance and patronage that kept the myriad packs from each other’s throats. They had a highly sophisticated civilization, and when they made first contact with an alien race, the ekuz, they were actually the more technologically advanced of the two. Continue reading

The Elbianian Nebula

The Elbian Nebula lies near the rimward end of the Orion Arm. The remnant of a relatively minor nova, it is small as such stellar objects go, only about three light years across. It would be completely unremarkable, if not for the cult that arose in connection with it, and the carnage that they wreaked. The name of the Elbianian Nebula would become synonymous in galactic history for fanaticism, atrocity, and unprovoked aggression. Continue reading